The new book features individuals pursuing clean slates, struggling to escape addictions or harmful partnerships, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. The author often employs the phrase "new beginning", making it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the story. At the same time, the author herself appears to be undertaking her individual reinvention, since this presents as a new kind of book – fact-based, truly literary. But then it turns out to be filled with the recurring issues and approaches as earlier books.
From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic
Chris Kraus began as an visual artist who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming personal female narrative from humiliation into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the following three compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the correspondence format brought to the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a maverick maker who had become a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It follows that she now wants to explore new kinds of material, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a period in which she states that contemporary political climate turns intimate literature obsolete.
Several Eras, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering several time periods – none able to break free from their backgrounds. We encounter the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, moving from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the guise of Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a community largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.
As a reader drawn to honed writing of the sort the author herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the narrative style of the initial segment.
As a reader who appreciates crafted language of the style that the author often disregards, I was captivated by the literary tone of the first section. It possesses a novel degree of detail that accommodates trivial aspects, like the pail that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, assisted by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was destined to be disappointed when I wished this new voice could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the satisfaction audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works reasserts itself in the central part. Catt Greene is working on refurbishing three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between Minnesota and LA, unable to aid her husband control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a environment fueled by the anger and fear that drives Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. At one point she says that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an America that her social media opponents would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".
The Homicide Account
Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the referenced day spent by the deceased with the perpetrator and his companions. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what happened when Brandon came to see Brittney after connecting via an application where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, wandering about fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to go further into her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels strangely incomplete, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
